by Maxim Biller
As you see, my greatly respected Herr Thomas Mann, thought Bruno, your double is not the only person in Drohobycz who has lost his wits. It began early with my sister Hania, and my father was in even more of a hurry to leave the world. Long before his death, he resorted to that in-between realm where, he thought, human beings, animals and plants could communicate without words. Shaking his head, Bruno put the black notebook aside, laid the pencil on the ice-cold floor, where it quickly rolled away like a frightened mouse, stopped when it reached one of the legs of the desk and stayed there. As my beloved and now dead mother nursed him, thought Bruno, without noticing that he was no longer writing, she, too, discovered the joys of unreality. To her way of thinking my father—even when he was as small as a baby again, lying in our little dog Nimrod’s basket, weeping and whispering as he nestled against the baffled animal—was a guilty man exploiting his mortal sickness to avoid responsibility for his house and his family, and so she would sometimes throw things at him: the key to the front door, or her siddur prayer book when she was in the middle of praying. Ever since then, my dear Herr Mann, I have asked myself three times a day: did Mama learn that from our implacable jailer Adele? Did she know how often Adele—a tiny woman, but often endowed by her fury with superhuman strength—had raised her hand to me in the old days, in one of the forgotten, empty, dusty attic rooms in our old house on the market place? I think there can be no two answers to that question. Once the roughly made wooden door of one of the rooms, where I was in the middle of my little conversation with Adele’s feather duster as it whistled through the air, was left open, and when I turned my head aside in pain I saw Mama’s helpless, harlequin face in the gap where the door stood ajar. Do you see what kind of a madhouse this town of Drohobycz is now, Dr Mann? People here never think and act as they should! I could tell you so many tales: my students, instead of drawing and doing their arithmetic exercises, generally perch on the rooftops of the houses, cooing and pecking, or fly in circles around the tower of the town hall. Hasenmass the hotel manager—I saw this through the window late at night last Saturday—has himself harnessed to a hackney cab by your double, and, naked and whinnying softly, he takes the master from bar to bar. Perelmann, the under-age, melancholy editor-in-chief of the Drohobycz News, writes every day in his paper that the Jews ought to renounce their faith, as they once did overnight in Spain in the past, and then they would soon be leading Torquemada’s divisions instead of being crushed by them. And Dr Franck, the specialist in internal medicine, closed his practice last month and sits on a bench at the railway station all day, reciting the Kaddish all the time.
And what about the lovely, gloomy Helena Jakubowicz? She, poor woman, believing too much in the enlightening power of literature and ideas, suffers from particularly severe depression, the result, as one tells oneself, of extreme literary ambition accompanied by only average talent. I do not know what it is that she likes about my stories. She takes them, she has told me a couple of times, as you might take an aspirin or, no, an antidote to the poison of hopelessness within herself. And having to wait so long for my new book often makes her even sadder—hence her eternal, abnormal, wild and illogical anger with me, the compliant scapegoat, the anger that comforts me whenever I am not holding Helena in check, and gives me the reassuring knowledge that childhood, snow-white or blood-red, will never pass away and become happiness. It really is a shame, Herr Mann, that you will never meet Helena. What a delicate, dear woman is hidden in reality behind the ill-smelling, downy, monkey hair on her face! And what if she were to wash and comb her hair properly for once, if she were to remove the sticky sawdust from her hair and her clothes, if she were to have a pedicure and put on a pretty, close-fitting French skirt suit? Then, ah then, I fear that perhaps I would never tremble with such pleasant desire in her presence. Now you can see how crazy a man gets to be if he lives here too long.
“I am not hungry, Hania,” said Bruno slowly and indistinctly, as if awakening from a deep sleep. Once again that growl came out of his throat, but this time it did not alarm him. “I am going to do a little more work, and later look in at the High School to see what they want me for there. Don’t wait for me.” He tried to stand up as quietly as possible, so as not to make any noise that would start Hania talking again, but she had already gone upstairs, for he heard her now in the kitchen above him playing a wild military march on pans, plates and the oven. At first his attempt to stand up went well. Bruno raised his torso and kept his balance without having to support himself with his hands on the cold stone floor—but when he tried getting to his feet he tottered, and had to kneel down again at once. He stayed like that for minutes on end, surprised to find that today, of all days, he had lost the ability to stand upright and walk. For many years he had expected that to happen, but not now, not until much later—in a future endlessly far away, populated by gigantic wall lizards, snakes and primeval birds who ate their own tails, by armies of human beings in gray uniforms in long, straggling processions that reached to the horizon, by millions of naked men, women and children who could move only on all fours. And everywhere in that country, fires large and small were burning, and anyone who could see through the smoke and the flames shooting up around him prayed that he might not be forced, like those people, to his hands and knees, and be driven like them into that fire.
“Professor! Professor! Don’t be afraid, we’ll see you safely through town to the High School! Mrs Jakubowicz isn’t as angry with you as you think, we’ve been talking to her about you. And she forgave us at once.”
Had he dreamt it, or had his students just called that out to him in chorus—cheeping, chirping, clear as a bell—from outside the skylight which was suddenly half open, flapping quietly in the wind? Bruno, still crouching on the floor with his head leaning on the greasy brown seat of the chair, acted as if he hadn’t heard anything. For some time, lying in wait like a cat with his eyes narrowed, he watched the pencil that had rolled away, and then suddenly snatched it up.
“It seems to me,” he wrote in his notebook again, pressing it open against the desk drawer, which stood ajar, “as if the people of Drohobycz had been waiting for someone like the false winner of the Nobel Prize to come to their town and turn their heads even more, my dear and highly esteemed Dr Mann. They have been living for too long with no contact with the outside world, a provincial existence makes them anxious, crazy, curious. They plan a day’s excursion to Stryj months in advance, and before anyone here travels to the capital, he visits Reynisz the notary to put his affairs in order. You should see the people of Drohobycz for yourself! They almost all have attractive, pale, friendly faces, behind which they conceal either nothing at all—or the longing for eternal bright nights and a pain that is otherwise described only in history books. I know”—he hesitated, but then quickly went on writing—“I know what I am talking about, for I am no exception. I have studied in Vienna and Lemberg, and all the same I came back again. I had a fiancée whose name I often forget; she left me because for years I promised to move to live with her in Warsaw, without ever really meaning it. And when I was awarded the Golden Laurel of the Academy of Literature last month, I lay in bed for days weeping, instead of being glad. So I too, my most esteemed Dr Mann, have recently let your double deceive me like everyone else. Last Saturday, when he was going down Florianska Street drawn along by Hasenmass the hotel manager, I did not just cast a quick glance out of the window and then quickly return to my work. Oh no! I leapt up from my desk, I tore off my clothes as I ran, and when I had caught up with the cab in which your ill-omened double sat, stiff and haughty as a German professor, I let myself be harnessed to it too as I went on full speed ahead, and so we trotted away to the Swaying Pyramid Hotel on the market place. Once we had arrived we were permitted (without the carriage, of course, but in full harness) to accompany the master into the manager’s bathroom, where he has been staying since his arrival in Drohobycz. This bathroom—it is almost as large as the hall of the Jagiełło High School,
and I hope you have comparable rooms in your new house in Zürich—contained no washbasins, no lavatory, no bathtub, only several showers fitted into the bare concrete ceiling, two benches and a long rail with clothes-hooks hanging from it. Obviously the false Nobel Prize winner had had everything removed as soon as he moved in, to leave more space for his many visitors. Those present that night were: Mrs Hasenmass; Lisowski the baker, with his wife and three sons; Adele; almost all my students; Mr Perelmann and Helena Jakubowicz; Jankel, my sister’s late husband; Reynisz the notary; and my friend and colleague Czarski, editor-in-chief of the Tygodnik Ilustrowany, who was staying in Drohobycz in order to persuade me (of course in vain) to publish a fragment of my novel in his journal. Later we were joined by a man whom I did not know, an American with half his face covered by a sparkling metal mask. This was the mysterious Mr Katanauskas. They had all”—here Bruno looked up and, before writing on, studied the large drawing on the wall to the right of the door, which depicted half a dozen small, thin, naked men kneeling in front of a young lady in high-heeled shoes and a torn ball gown, with their avid eyes, full of despair and desire, open wide as if they were slowly suffocating under the influence of an invisible opiate—“they had all, like me and Hasenmass the hotel manager, stripped naked. They had hung their clothes on the hooks, and they sat in silence, or engaged in excessively low-voiced conversation with each other, on the two benches, waiting. When the master entered, with the hotel manager and me, they rose at almost the same time, covered their bare chests and their genitals with their hands, and even the last and quietest conversations died down. The false Thomas Mann at first acted as if the over-intimate and pushy behavior of his guests, if one may so call it, was unwelcome to him. As they suddenly began moving towards him, like a brood of turtles slowly awakening and making their way from the beach into the water, he raised his hands in a gesture of rejection. He briskly twirled the ends of his mustache, then took a half-smoked cigar from the inside pocket of his shabby tweed jacket, which was buttoned up the wrong way, and tried to light it. He succeeded only at the third or fourth attempt. ‘How are you, my friends?’ he said uncertainly, and the cigar smoke that he puffed out mingled with his breath, which smelt of something rotten. ‘I’m glad to see you again. I’m afraid I must return to Zürich tomorrow to fetch my wife and children. After that we shall board a train for Marseilles, and we go on from there by sea to New York. We have the prospect of a very pretty villa in Princeton; I think I shall be able to pay for it cash down with the advances for the last part of the Joseph tetralogy. I’m very sorry that I must leave you here alone; I know the times will get no better, and the guarantees of the Allies are, as we can see from the example of the poor Czechs and Slovaks, worth nothing. But good Mr Katanauskas has kept his promise, and we can set off for America at last. We would be stupid not to go, don’t you agree?’ They all—as one man—took a stride towards him, and then another stride and yet another, they murmured softly, ‘Oh dear’ and ‘Please don’t go’, and the first arms were already winding around his throat and his arms. ‘It’s not my fault, believe me,’ he said, ‘please stop this, it’s uncomfortable for me. Stop it!’ By now the manager Hasenmass’s bathroom was full of metallic blue smoke, and you could hardly see whose hand was tugging at the alleged Thomas Mann’s hair, which was slicked back with gel, while he tried to unbutton his shirt. ‘Stop that at once!’ he cried again. Then he produced, as if from nowhere, the horsewhip that he had never once had to use during our harmonious ride through the sleeping town of Drohobycz, and he began fending off the naked men who were pestering him with short, sharp cracks of that whip. I myself—I was standing beside that twitching, sighing, ever-growing human pyramid as it collapsed on itself—I myself, unfortunately, was struck by none of them. He whipped the men, then the women, then even the children, and if there had still been traces of reluctance to be seen at first in his long, masterful and treacherous face, as it kept emerging in the hazy cigar smoke, he seemed to be coming to enjoy all this whipping, pushing and cursing. ‘Is it my fault that a decent man like me can’t be sure of his life in Europe today?’ he exclaimed, striking the weeping editor-in-chief Perelmann a blow on the nose with the handle of the whip. ‘I’d rather be at home in Munich watching little boys in Briennerstrasse than wading in the swamps of Galicia!’ he cried, belaboring the buttocks of the sighing Adele. Then he turned to the totally confused baker Lisowski, who had probably last read more than three consecutive sentences at his bar-mitzvah ceremony, and while he covered the baker’s fat belly and upper arms with red welts from the whip he cried, ‘You and those bandits in Berlin are to blame for everything that’s going wrong: Germany, Europe, the world. You were the first to say that humanity is alone, and so now every other idiot takes himself for God on earth!’ Yes, my highly esteemed Dr Mann, even Mr Katanauskas”—and the same rigid smile with which his students sometimes adorned the kites flying over the Koszmarsko stone quarry appeared on Bruno’s face—“even he was not spared. Only now he was crying in his fine Vilna Yiddish that he wanted to go to New York with you, one pogrom in his life was enough, and as honorary American consul he had the same rights as those he was helping—when he got a push in his bare belly from your double, and as he fell his metal mask was kicked. The mask came off, landed clinking and dancing on the floor, and now, in so far as it was possible to see it in the smoke wafting back and forth, a half-burnt face with a dark, empty eye socket came into view. Then it was poor Helena’s turn, and after her came my students, who at some point, instead of fluttering about Hasenmass’s bathroom screeching, formed a protective circle around their gasping and exhausted teacher Helena with wings spread wide. But gradually the blows inflicted by the German grew weaker, and so did his voice, in the silvery clouds of smoke the wavering contours of the sad, childish face of Lieutenant Alfred Dreyfus formed for a moment, then the French officer became the weeping, bleeding Jagienka Łomska, then I saw myself coming out of the smoke, and finally the cloud turned, coalesced and climbed to the ceiling, where it disappeared with a loud hiss into the jets of the showers—thus revealing a great heap of naked bodies lying lifeless around the false Thomas Mann as he knelt there, exhausted. ‘Me too,’ I cried in all the confusion. ‘I want to come too!’ But as he mopped the sweat off his throat and forehead with a handkerchief that was stiff and sticky with dirt, he replied in a friendly tone, ‘Not you, you’ll still be needed. You must write your novel. What is it to be called? The Messiah, am I right? To work, get down to work, and when you have finished those bandits will come from Berlin to your little town and burn you along with your wonderful manuscript. Too bad—it’s your own fault!’ He laughed. ‘Terrific, what a subject! But who will write a novel about it when you are dead, Jew Schulz?’”
Maybe the ending goes a little too far, thought Bruno, as he read the last pages of his letter to his famous and influential colleague in Zürich. Will he believe it of me? Will he give me his support? Won’t he think I mean him? And suddenly his companion Fear was back, Fear who had left him for the last couple of hours, and the hot gray lump was turning in his belly again. At the same time Hania’s loud footsteps shook the black and now almost invisible basement ceiling from above, and he was afraid that she might at any moment break through the floor of the kitchen with her high stiletto heels and pierce his head. Hania—poor, intolerable Hania—had recently taken to wearing her expensive French shoes even at home, as well as her chiffon dress from Lunarski & Klein in Warsaw, for she was expecting the late Jankel back anytime soon, and wanted to be beautiful for him. And as she almost never took off the dress, not even when she was cooking, and certainly not now, it was covered with splashes of red borscht and dried yellow bits of dough, and its lovely white puff sleeves had dozens of holes burnt in them. Hania was not the only bundle of nerves in the house. Her two sons were also getting more and more restless from week to week, and were in a bad way. Their trousers and shirts were torn, they had dark red, almost black scabs on their bare knees
, they cut each other’s unwashed hair with the kitchen scissors, so that it looked untidy and all tousled as if they were vagrants, and Bruno hadn’t seen them in school for months. When their mother asked them something, they either didn’t reply at all, or threatened to throw her out of the house, so she generally kept quiet in their presence. However, Jacek and Chaimele left their uncle in peace. Only sometimes, when he was lying on Papa’s old, greasy, Biedermeier sofa with its huge vultures’ feet and claws and, quietly moving his lips, read a book or drew a sketch, did they talk about him in whispers. “Who’s going to look after us when the Russians or the Germans come?” Jacek said to Chaimele a few days ago. And Chaimele replied, giggling, “Uncle Bruno, of course. Along with the tarts from Stryj Street and his writer friends in Warsaw, he’s sure to know what to do.” Whereupon Bruno uttered a quiet whistle of alarm, gave the sofa a little pat, and it immediately pattered out of the living room with him and into the library, where he could be undisturbed again.
By now it was so dark in Bruno’s basement study that he could hardly read his own handwriting. The faint, orange, fantastic light of the street lamps that had just come on outside in Florianska Street was lost halfway between the open skylight and his easel, where he had hung up his hat and coat for years, and sometimes he imagined hanging himself up on it. He quickly stood up, forced himself back behind the low desk and switched on the handsome, cold, German lamp, with its black metal shade that even after years shone like polished cavalry boots. Only when he was sitting on Papa’s creaking old office chair did it occur to him that he was no longer crouching on the floor, like one of the creatures from his daydreams that had no will of their own, scribbling violet lines, squiggles and little hooks, like an insect, in his notebook, marks that might even make some kind of sense in the end. But Fear was still there, and Fear whispered: you must come to the point. Do you know how many letters he gets every day? Yes, I do, replied Bruno, but do you really think I can write to him now and tell him what I really want him to do? Yes, why not, replied Fear, although I’m not perfectly sure, because I am Fear. Haven’t I overdone it? said Bruno. I mean saying that someone else is pretending to be him, could be him, but that he is so brutish and arrogant to the very people who respect him and sing his praises. I mean, it does sound rather unlikely, doesn’t it? Do you know the story of the people of Sichem, asked Fear, do you know what happened to them after they had chosen Abimelech as ruler of the Philistines? Not exactly, said Bruno, will you tell me? Later, maybe, said Fear, you’re not ready for it yet.